Is there a Muslim Society? Ernest Gellner's sociology of Islam

Abstract

Ernest Gellner's well-known model aspires to a general interpretation of all Muslim societies, past and present. They are said to have invarying features, susceptible to analysis in terms of a common sociology, one of a dialectic between city and tribe, each with its own peculiar form of religion, and the dominance within the urban form of ulama leading a solidary community based on scripture and Divine Law. Within this configuration, political rule is always vulnerable to the double threat of the tribes at the gate and the ulama-led urban society which never fully recognizes the legitimacy of government. While modernity has ended the power of the tribes, urbanization and mass literacy have reinforced the religion-based urban ethos and its challenge to secular power, which explains the current surge of Islamism in politics. The validity of this model is questioned in the historical and the modern contexts. It is argued that there are certain cultural themes common to most Muslim lands and epochs which derive from religion and common historical reference, but that it would be a mistake to think that the concepts and entities specified by these themes, such as the category of ‘ulama’, are sociological or political contants: they are assigned different meanings and roles by socio-political contexts. Modern Islamism is a political ideology quite distinct from anything in Muslim history, which, in recent years, has become a dominant idiom for the expression of various and sometimes contradictory interests, aspirations and frustrations. In this it has replaced the previously dominant secular nationalisms and Marxism. The wide variety of social and political forms to be found historically and in the present cannot be interpreted as variations on a common model of an essential Muslim society, but are explicable only in terms of the normal practice of social and political analysis, like any other range of societies.

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